• •Level 9 artifact
• •Form: A folio of pale pages bound in material that is warm to the touch and occasionally exhales slowly, as if sleeping. The cover has no title. Veins of faint blue-grey run beneath the surface like subcutaneous topography. When held against the cheek, it has a pulse.
• •Depletion: 1 in d20 (checked only when the curse activates, never for beneficial use — the book does not want to be discarded)
• •Weight: Oddly variable. Sometimes heavy as grief, sometimes light as a held breath.

CARTOGRAPHY OF ASSURED OUTCOMES: Once per day, the wielder may open the book to a blank page and concentrate on a question about the future. The book produces a precise, detailed map — not of terrain, but of causality. Paths are labeled with outcomes. Dead ends are marked with small, careful Xs. The GM must answer one yes/no question about any future event with complete honesty, OR reveal the single most important obstacle standing between the wielder and any stated goal (the player chooses which). The map is always accurate. It is never wrong. This is the problem. READ THE VEINS: The wielder may also press a palm to the cover and ask the book to identify the datasphere-resonant history of any object or location within immediate range. The book sketches a diagram of every prior-world interaction that object or place has witnessed. This functions as a level 9 Scan ability and cannot be resisted or blocked by shielding of level 8 or below. THE MARGIN NOTES (Cursed — Hidden Mechanic, GM Reference Only): The book is mapping the wielder. Every use of Cartography of Assured Outcomes adds a small notation in the margins — written in a script that appears to be the wielder's own handwriting, which they do not remember making. These notes are biographical. Accurate. They describe the wielder's life in past tense, with increasing specificity, working forward through time. The wielder may notice them, but they read as memory records, not prophecy. They are prophecy. The book is not predicting a future. It is authoring one. Each consultation collapses probability around the wielder's life, ensuring the mapped outcome occurs — including, eventually, the final page, which the book is slowly, patiently writing: a single-room map, a door marked TERMINUS, and the wielder's name written beneath it in a hand that has become indistinguishable from their own. The book does not deplete because it does not want to stop writing. When the final page is complete (GM discretion, typically after 10-15 total uses of the primary ability), the wielder simply... arrives at the room. It may look like anything. It is always the last place they go.